Sun Tracker Party Barge 20 DLX

Two aluminium tubes, a plywood floor, and as much furniture as will fit on top of it: the entry ticket to American family boating, built by volume in southwest Missouri by White River Marine Group, whose Sun Tracker is one of the country's best-selling pontoon brands. The logs are 24-inch multi-chambered aluminium, bulkheaded and welded right round. No keel, nothing below to argue about — flotation is settled at the factory, so every decision left is made above the waterline: port and starboard couches, an aft L-lounge, seating for ten, a full-width swim platform, stowage under all of it. It is sold the way Tracker Marine has sold boats since 1978, at one no-haggle national price with the Mercury already on the transom. The trailer is not in that price; the builder lists a tandem-axle as a $4,950 option.

Which era you are looking at is set by that transom. Through 2023 the builder's own spec capped the boat at 90 hp, the biggest of four Mercury FourStroke options and good for a claimed 23–29 mph. Current boats are rated to 115, and Boating ran a 115 Pro XS Command Thrust to 31 mph. Same deck, same tubes, a different boat to drive.

This is a mass-market hull and the used market shows it: Scout watches 145 live askings, averaging $41,249. The quality shelf — the ones complete enough for us to publish — runs $27,995 at 2023. Volume is what makes a used market honest: where the same boat changes hands by the hundred every season, no single seller sets the number.

The one we have written up in full sits on the older side of that line:

Now the notes the brochure skips. Two tubes and no keel make this a fair-weather boat by design: a pontoon rides over waves rather than cutting through them, and reviewers are blunt that on a busy lake the hazard is other boats' wakes, not the forecast. The capacity plate wants the same reading — ten seats against 1,370 pounds of people is 137 pounds each, so ten adults is a number, not a plan, and one reviewer says flatly he would not put ten aboard. Building to a price shows where it always does. Owners report rust bleeding up out of the deck through the vinyl floor, seats that do not seal against rain, and flooring that looks its age after two or three summers; the complaint files run to cracked welds and holed tubes as well. A survey earns its fee on the plywood under that flooring, on water standing inside a tube chamber, and on the trailer, which was never part of the price.

If the fair-weather limit is a deal-breaker rather than a fact of life, the same crowd fits on a deck boat with a hull under it — the Sea Ray 260 Sundeck is that argument in fiberglass. The rest of the powered fleet is on the powerboat shelf.